`Gone Fishing' Doesn't Mean I'll Catch Any

My brother, the crazy one I haven't seen for 15 years, was taking off for Tampa Bay at midnight. He had an old fishing pole and six live shrimp.

He asked if I knew anything about snook. He heard they hung around bridge pilings, so he was going to Gandy Bridge to catch one.

All I knew about snook was that he wasn't about to catch one the first time out with an old pole and six live shrimp. Snook were as elusive as burglars and as powerful as linebackers.

Men who devoted their lives to the art of catching snook often did not catch snook.

My brother returned with two large fish tails sticking out the top of a 5-gallon bucket. They belonged to two deceased snook. There would have been a third, but he lost it in the pilings.

I remembered when we were little kids and he pulled in the only redfish ever taken from the neighborhood pier. He caught it on a line tied to a broomstick.

The ability to catch fish, I concluded while looking in that bucket, was not learned behavior. It was a genetic trait from our hunter-gatherer past.

It was my curse that I was born with the passion but not the gene. But I believed I could overcome this lack of innate ability. That which did not come naturally could be obtained by superior intellect.

I was, after all, the highest order of sentient being. I planned for tomorrow. I feared my own death. I soothed myself with theories of an afterlife.

Fish did none of these things.

Fish did not even have opposable thumbs.

What chance did fish have against me, a hunter armed with the technology of a society that could put a bomb into a manhole from 40,000 feet. I had GPS receivers, depth recorders, stealth line, lures that created sonic waves, oily scents that fish could not resist.

But they did resist.

I spent entire vacations devoted to catching fish and did not catch fish.

I fished where people with fishing genetics told me to fish and used the bait they told me to use, and I did not catch fish. I sat in my boat, a madman looking out over the water's surface, cursing the life beneath it.

It was not for the love of fishing that I fished. It had become a test of wills with myself to prove that, by God, I could catch a fish!

I'm sure there were sibling issues. My brother couldn't hold a job, couldn't function in society, but he had the last laugh because he could take six shrimp to Gandy Bridge and turn them into two snook and one lost in the pilings.

Five years ago, the obsession ended. I started a family. Gone was cave diving. Gone was bike racing.

Gone was fishing . . . until now.

I am in my kayak once again, skimming over the grass flats of the Indian River Lagoon. The fish pick up where they left off -- ignoring me.

Three dolphin thrash in the water, chasing breakfast. Mullet explode from the surface to escape them. How many people get to see that?

I decided in advance I would get skunked and be fine with it. Call it an experiment to see if time and family have mellowed me.

"It will be a good day for fishing," a Brevard fishing guide named Rodney Smith once told me. "But I don't know if it will be a good day for catching anything."